Editor’s Letter: The Beauty of the Last-Minute Trip

It seems that any time my sister and I try to plan a trip together too far in advance, one of us always ends up having to cancel. Which is why, when a work trip to India that had been rescheduled a half dozen times was finally locked in just three weeks prior to departure, I asked her to join me. I wagered that by short-circuiting the anticipatory anxiety that surrounds travel, we would have fewer obstacles three weeks out than with three months or a year of plotting. And I was right. My sister, a Los Angeles–based psychotherapist, was able to give her patients just enough (but not too much) warning. On my end, once meetings in Mumbai and Delhi were set, the rest of my schedule leading up to the trip was compressed accordingly. As with most commitments in life, those to non-refundable airline tickets will, ironically, set you free—free from the indecision that often leads to travel inertia. Meetings get more efficient pre-departure, loose ends get tied up without fuss, incorrigible physical and electronic in- boxes are tamed with uncharacteristic yet thrilling ruthlessness. I, at least, am never more decisive or organized than in the days leading up to a long trip.

While my sister and I had been talking about traveling through Rajasthan together for years, there never seemed to be enough time. Somehow, if you are lucky enough to travel extensively in your younger years, entitlement to three weeks of travel a year becomes your baseline forever after—an elusive luxury seemingly never to be recovered until retirement. Add to that the fact that we live on opposite coasts and the fallacy that you need a minimum of three weeks to “do India right” and it’s a miracle we pulled the trigger at all.

And yet we did. Despite the not-enough-time warnings, we nevertheless piggybacked onto the trip a long weekend in northern India, covering three additional cities and more than 500 miles in a four-day period. We even added a detour that required an unplanned six-hour drive and the last-minute booking of an internal flight back to Delhi in time for our return flights home. It was a plan we hatched at 4:45 one morning as we both lay awake in the dark, and put into place by 7 a.m. with a few calls. It was also, needless to say, the highlight of our trip—not least because of its spontaneity. You forget that a six-hour car ride, where you get to passively absorb a region’s numerous micro-cultures and climates while talking to your sibling at a teen’s languorous pace, is perhaps the greatest luxury of all.

And while India is in fact a place that always leaves you wanting to see more, you never really regret what you didn’t see of any given place—only that you didn’t make the trip sooner. As sisters who grew up flying long distances as unaccompanied minors to join our parents on work trips around the world, we quickly fell into our habitual solidarity, an easy rhythm of shared toiletries and shoes and tacit compensation for each other’s organizational lacunae.

In the end, I can’t decide what I enjoyed more: hashing out a final accounting of certain fuzzy chapters in our family history through our mutually distorted lens; or the privilege of proximity and silence, an adult’s version of parallel child’s play. It seems that it is only through travel’s time warp that we get to tap into earlier versions of ourselves—this time with the wisdom of our collective years logged.

Check out the rest of our April inspiration board and get a behind-the-scenes look at our Europe Issue on pinterest.com/cntraveler.